
Mermaid Tears
amy worcester · Ongoing · 248.1k Words
Introduction
Meanwhile, their children from previous marriages are moving out and starting their own lives. This book focuses on the next generation of the family.
Jaxon, Ty and Bunny already have a daughter and are expecting another baby. As Ty and Bunny move up in their careers, Jaxon wonders if there is more that he should be doing. With their encouragement, he returns to school, but it puts a strain on their relationships.
Jolene and Neo are still building a relationship, planning a wedding and rebuilding after Neo's business was sabotaged. She is doing better after divorcing her abusive ex who is now in jail. But some of Hank's other decisions start to haunt her and threaten their future.
JD and Dean are starting their lives together with him in the Navy and her attending nearby Tulane. Their roommate is struggling to move past a lost relationship and makes Dean question what she wants.
Cheryl and Wayne have moved back to be closer to her family. But as her large family interferes, she starts to remember why she moved away.
Please be aware that there are trigger warnings: abusive relationship recovery, reverse harem, military trauma, and death.
Chapter 1
Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Seventeen years, four months and nine days.
If you did the math from the day she was born, until the day she died, that’s what you would get. She had always called it the ‘Dash Time.’ He could still hear her voice.
That’s what matters, Coop. Not when I was born, or when I’ll die. It’s that dash time in between. That’s the only thing that really matters.
The Dash Time.
Her Dash Time was seventeen years, four months and nine days.
Cooper stood in the quiet graveyard and looked at the pink marble headstone, his running shoes squishing slightly in the ground still damp from an overnight rain. Standing beneath the overcast sky, it was almost as if nature was crying with him, accepting the tears as it had the raindrops in the dark hours.
There was no reason for him to blink the tears away from his eyes. He knew what the headstone said by heart.
Tabitha Michelle Henderson Cooper
Beloved daughter, sister, wife and friend
Wife. She had been his wife for five days. Tabby had been the only daughter and she wanted to walk down the aisle with her father. He had been sitting in the hospital room when she made her final wish.
To get married.
Without any hesitation, he proposed.
His best friend’s twin sister was dying of cancer, and he had loved her for years. Knew that he would always love her. Before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he pictured a life with her. Two or three kids. White picket fence. Dog running around the yard.
He wanted the life that the Hendersons had. An undying love. One that held them together through the death of their only daughter.
And a year later, to the day, their only son.
Cooper’s eyes moved to the dark gray headstone next to Tabby’s.
Eighteen years, four months and nine days.
Tennyson Michael Henderson.
Beloved brother, son and friend.
Cooper’s heart broke the day that she died. It was broken but continued to beat inside his chest. Tenn never recovered. They had made it through their senior year without her. Made it through basic training. Cooper thought that they would make it through and beyond the first anniversary together.
Instead, Chief woke him up just before five that morning, told him that there was something he had to tell Cooper. Later that day, Cooper and Chief stood on the Henderson’s front porch. Unable to live without his twin, Tenn hung himself in the stairwell of the barracks.
Roughly at the same time that Tabby had died the year before.
Coop never asked why. He knew. On the same early June day, two years in a row, his heart broke. The first year it continued to beat because he promised her he would go on. The second year, he was not certain that it would continue to beat.
Standing before the headstones, he slipped his hand inside his pocket and felt the small band of gold that he had put on her finger six years and five days ago. The same band again reminded Cooper that he still had to continue to live. He had promises to keep.
It was a simple gold band; she didn’t want anything elaborate. Didn’t want anyone to waste their money on a dying wish. The simple band had been donated by a jeweler, accepting the meager forty-five dollars that Cooper had in his pocket. As simple as it was, he knew it cost more than the measly two twenties and five ones.
He had argued with the jeweler to accept it and finally the old man took it, telling the teen groom that it would be donated.
A local dress shop brought in two racks of dresses for Tabby to choose from. She had been too weak to try them on, so one of the nurses modeled for her. The pale pink dress with a sheer shawl hid the IV tubes while keeping her arms exposed.
She had made a beautiful bride.
In the pink lined coffin, she would wear her bridal gown forever more. Her brother was buried in his crisp new Navy uniform.
Cooper finally let his eyes move to the double headstone on the other side of Tabby’s. It had only recently been placed; the marble had not even settled into the ground yet. They were killed in a head on collision at the beginning of the year.
Barely a week after celebrating his friend getting married, he learned of their deaths. When he got the notice, JD had been with him. JD had taken him home, to the house that his stepdad, Reese, had bought for him and his new wife, then he sat up with Cooper as he drank himself stupid.
In the morning, they requested emergency leave. Cooper because the only family that he had left was now gone. And JD because he believed his friend needed support. Chief Pollard and Captain Harlow agreed and sent JD with Cooper.
While they were here in January, Cooper told him all the details of his life. His father left to go get the infamous pack of cigarettes before his son was even born. His mother had worked multiple jobs to pay her way through nursing school. Continued to work multiple jobs to ensure her son had a future. He spent more and more time with the Henderson’s and when she was killed by a psych patient, they petitioned for custody.
His own mother lay in a grave on the other side of the property. The grave marked by only a flat slab with her name and dates on it. No epitaph. No design. Not even a beloved mother engraving.
Josephine Cooper
Thirty-two years, six months and twenty-three days.
Her dash time was spent working, studying and trying to keep her son out of trouble. Her dash time was longer than Tabby’s, but Tabby lived hers to the fullest. When the cancer diagnosis came, she made a bucket list. By the time the treatments quit working and her cancer became terminal, she had done most of her items.
There were a few that she never got to do. Her family did them in her memory after her death.
After they were married, Tabby gave Cooper her other bucket list. And her TBR. He didn’t know what a TBR was.
“To. Be. Read.” She laughed. “These are the books that I want to read. And these,” she handed him a piece of paper, “are the things that I always wanted to experience. More than just reading about them. Do them for me.”
He had expected to see a trip to the Caribbean. A cruise. Fishing in Alaska. Things she had always talked about.
“Find a woman, a good woman, Coop, and experience all of it with her.”
As a seventeen-year-old boy, he had not known what half the things on her list were. Shared. Placed on a spit. Stuffed. Watched. Toys. There were even specific toys listed. And places. Against a wall. Over a desk. On the beach.
Over the past six years, he had read her books. Experimented with different sex positions. Different places.
But he knew it wasn’t what she wanted. Even though he had done everything on the list, sometimes multiple times, none of them were marked off. Tabby didn’t want him to do it with random women, like the waitress that JD had introduced him to. She had been a little freak, willing to do damned near anything.
As long as it was casual, no repeat performances and was never spoken of in the diner.
“I think I may have found her.” Cooper finally whispered to his wife’s headstone. “You would like her.”
He stepped forward and laid a penny on Tenn’s headstone. “I miss you, man.”
With a glance at the double headstone, he turned and walked back to where JD stood next to his pickup truck. The younger man pulled him into a hug and held him as Cooper gave into the tears.
Cooper stood a few inches taller than his friend’s six feet two inches. Where he had pale blonde hair and pale green eyes, JD had mousy brown hair and dark hazel eyes. He also had more tattoos and muscular bulk than his younger friend. But they both spent a lot of time at the gym.
And in the tattoo chair.
They both wore jeans and blue Navy T-shirts for their unit. Cooper’s arms were completely sleeved out while the newer tattoos barely peeked out from JD’s sleeve.
“I’m here, man.” JD told him and Cooper nodded.
Last Chapters
#178 178 - Cubes
Last Updated: 10/31/2025#177 177 - Alone No More
Last Updated: 10/27/2025#176 176 - Boxes of Things
Last Updated: 10/22/2025#175 175 - In-Between
Last Updated: 10/16/2025#174 174 - Cafe Lunch
Last Updated: 10/12/2025#173 173 - Custody Details
Last Updated: 10/6/2025#172 172 - Marti's Office
Last Updated: 10/3/2025#171 171 - Goth Girl in Training
Last Updated: 10/3/2025#170 170 - Nursery (Tissue Warning)
Last Updated: 10/3/2025#169 169 - Ant Shel, One L
Last Updated: 10/3/2025
You Might Like 😍
The Biker's Fate
I squeezed my eyes shut.
"Dani," he pressed. "Do you get me?"
"No, Austin, I don't," I admitted as I pulled my robe closed again and sat up. "You confuse me."
He dragged his hands down his face. "Tell me what's on your mind."
I sighed. "You're everything my parents warned me against. You're secretive, but you're also honest. I feel wholly protected by you, but then you scare me more than anyone I've ever known. You're a bad boy, but when I dated a so-called good one, he turned out to be the devil, so, yeah, I don't get you because you're not what I expected. You drive me crazier than anyone I've ever met, but then you make me feel complete. I'm feeling things I don't quite know how to process and that makes me want to run. I don't want to give up something that might be really, really good, but I also don't want to be stupid and fall for a boy just because he's super pretty and makes me come."
Danielle Harris is the daughter of an overprotective police chief and has led a sheltered life. As a kindergarten teacher, she's as far removed from the world of Harleys and bikers as you could get, but when she's rescued by the sexy and dangerous Austin Carver, her life is changed forever.
Although Austin 'Booker' Carver is enamored by the innocent Dani, he tries to keep the police chief's daughter at arm's length. But when a threat is made from an unexpected source, he finds himself falling hard and fast for the only woman who can tame his wild heart.
Will Booker be able to find the source of the threat before it's too late?
Will Dani finally give her heart to a man who's everything she's been warned about?
The Prison Project
Can love tame the untouchable? Or will it only fuel the fire and cause chaos amongst the inmates?
Fresh out of high school and suffocating in her dead-end hometown, Margot longs for her escape. Her reckless best friend, Cara, thinks she's found the perfect way out for them both - The Prisoner Project - a controversial program offering a life-changing sum of money in exchange for time spent with maximum-security inmates.
Without hesitation, Cara rushes to sign them up.
Their reward? A one-way ticket into the depths of a prison ruled by gang leaders, mob bosses, and men the guards wouldn't even dare to cross...
At the centre of it all, meets Coban Santorelli - a man colder than ice, darker than midnight, and as deadly as the fire that fuels his inner rage. He knows that the project may very well be his only ticket to freedom - his only ticket to revenge on the one who managed to lock him up and so he must prove that he can learn to love…
Will Margot be the lucky one chosen to help reform him?
Will Coban be capable of bringing something to the table other than just sex?
What starts off as denial may very well grow in to obsession which could then fester in to becoming true love…
A temperamental romance novel.
From Substitute To Queen
Heartbroken, Sable discovered Darrell having sex with his ex in their bed, while secretly transferring hundreds of thousands to support that woman.
Even worse was overhearing Darrell laugh to his friends: "She's useful—obedient, doesn't cause trouble, handles housework, and I can fuck her whenever I need relief. She's basically a live-in maid with benefits." He made crude thrusting gestures, sending his friends into laughter.
In despair, Sable left, reclaimed her true identity, and married her childhood neighbor—Lycan King Caelan, nine years her senior and her fated mate. Now Darrell desperately tries to win her back. How will her revenge unfold?
From substitute to queen—her revenge has just begun!
The mafia princess return
His Mission
Emily is suddenly thrown from one world of danger and uncertainty into another. The two teens ride the rollercoaster of love, unbelievable betrayal and heartache.
Badass in Disguise
"Jade, I need to check your—" the nurse began.
"OUT!" I snarled with enough force that both women backed toward the door.
Once feared by Shadow Organization that drugged me to replicate my abilities into a more controllable version, I had escaped my restraints and detonated their entire facility, ready to die alongside my captors.
Instead, I woke up in a school infirmary with women arguing around me, their voices piercing my skull. My outburst froze them in shock—clearly they hadn't expected such a reaction. One woman threatened as she left, "We'll discuss this attitude when you get home."
The bitter truth? I've been reborn into the body of an overweight, weak, and supposedly dim-witted high school girl. Her life is filled with bullies and tormentors who've made her existence miserable.
But they have no idea who they're dealing with now.
I didn't survive as the world's deadliest assassin by allowing anyone to push me around. And I certainly won't start now.
Goddess Of The Underworld.
When the veil between the Divine, the Living, and the Dead begins to crack, Envy is thrust beneath with a job she can’t drop: keep the worlds from bleeding together, shepherd the lost, and make ordinary into armor, breakfasts, bedtime, battle plans. Peace lasts exactly one lullaby. This is the story of a border pup who became a goddess by choosing her family; of four imperfect alphas learning how to stay; of cake, iron, and daylight negotiations. Steamy, fierce, and full of heart, Goddess of the Underworld is a reverse harem, found-family paranormal romance where love writes the rules and keeps three realms from falling apart.
A pack of their own
Mated by Contract to the Alpha
William—my devastatingly handsome, wealthy werewolf fiancé destined to become Delta—was supposed to be mine forever. After five years together, I was ready to walk down the aisle and claim my happily ever after.
Instead, I found him with her. And their son.
Betrayed, jobless, and drowning in my father's medical bills, I hit rock bottom harder than I ever imagined possible. Just when I thought I'd lost everything, salvation came in the form of the most dangerous man I'd ever encountered.
Damien Sterling—future Alpha of the Silver Moon Shadow Pack and ruthless CEO of Sterling Group—slid a contract across his desk with predatory grace.
“Sign this, little doe, and I'll give you everything your heart desires. Wealth. Power. Revenge. But understand this—the moment you put pen to paper, you become mine. Body, soul, and everything in between.”
I should have run. Instead, I signed my name and sealed my fate.
Now I belong to the Alpha. And he's about to show me just how wild love can be.
Omega Bound
Thane Knight is the alpha of the Midnight Pack of the La Plata Mountain Range, the largest wolf shifter pack in the world. He is an alpha by day and hunts the shifter trafficking ring with his group of mercenaries by night. His hunt for vengeance leads to one raid that changes his life.
Tropes:
Touch her and die/Slow burn romance/Fated Mates/Found family twist/Close circle betrayal/Cinnamon roll for only her/Traumatized heroine/Rare wolf/Hidden powers/Knotting/Nesting/Heats/Luna/Attempted assassination
The War God Alpha's Arranged Bride
Yet Alexander made his decision clear to the world: “Evelyn is the only woman I will ever marry.”
“Burn those who burned me!”
Burn those who burned me is an anthology book circulated on truth; justice; and REVENGE!
Story #1 The Ballad of Rabena Price.
Story #2 The rebirth of Clara Granger
Story #3 The violin of Graceland Teague
Story #4 The list for Josie Taylor
Story #5 COMING SOON!












